Hotel Cartagena Read online

  Twenty floors above the shimmering lights of the Hamburg docks, Public Prosecutor Chastity Riley is celebrating a birthday with friends in a hotel bar when twelve heavily armed men pull out guns and take everyone hostage. Among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel owner, who is being targeted by a man whose life – and family – have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions.

  With the police looking on from outside – their colleagues’ lives at stake – and Chastity on the inside, increasingly ill from an unexpected case of sepsis, the stage is set for a dramatic confrontation … and a devastating outcome for the team … all livestreamed in a terrifying bid for revenge.

  Crackling with energy and populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Hotel Cartagena is a searing, stunning thriller that will leave you breathless.

  HOTEL CARTAGENA

  SIMONE BUCHHOLZ

  TRANSLATED BY RACHEL WARD

  For Alan Rickman

  I make myself hold out

  Cause if it kills me

  I don’t care

  —Millie Jackson

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  WAS THAT IT THEN, I ASKED

  two days earlier, a hotel near the port in Hamburg

  OPEN UP, POLICE

  WHY EXACTLY DO WE NEED ALL THAT GELIGNITE AGAIN?

  MY HEART MAKES AN UNHEALTHY SOUND

  St Pauli, summer 1984

  HAS SHE GONE TO BED NOW OR WHAT

  ANY MORE THAN TWO HOSTAGES AND THINGS GET MUDDLED

  Cartagena, early 1987

  BUT THEY SURELY WON’T START SHOOTING PEOPLE RIGHT AWAY

  Hamburg-Blankenese, autumn 1997

  A BREATH OF WIND GETS UP FOR A WHILE

  Cartagena, 1997

  OPEN BAR

  ARE THE NINJA TURTLES ON THEIR WAY?

  Curaçao, summer 2001

  MY HAND IN THE VODKA

  HIS HEAD IN THE CIRCULAR SAW

  Curaçao, winter 2001

  DIDN’T WE WANT TO SHOOT OUT THE SMOKE DETECTORS?

  Curaçao, November 2017

  COLUMBOISHNESS

  St Pauli, summer 2018

  THE WURST IS YET TO COME

  ALEX MEIER FOOTBALL GOD

  SPOTLESS DISPLAY OF EMOTION

  THE DESIRE TO FLIP HIS LID

  SHIT-SPINNER-WHIRLIGIG

  A RAIN OF ASH

  SOME JUST SLIP TO THE FLOOR

  THE MESSAGE

  CUT THE CAMERA

  BUT YOU JUST CAN’T ENDURE LOVE ALONE

  HIS INTERNAL MURDER BUTTON

  GOD, HOW DUMB ARE YOU?

  TRACTOR BEAM

  BECAUSE HE’S WELL VERSED IN PEOPLE’S SOULS

  THERE’S A DETONATOR IN THE CAKE MIX

  HENNING OR HENK OR WHATEVER

  BOOM

  BOOM

  BOOM

  EXIT ONE: THE OCEAN’S ELEVEN VERSION

  EXIT TWO: THE SEX-GOD VERSION

  EXIT THREE: THE SHACKLETON VERSION

  EXIT FOUR: THE ARSEHOLE VERSION

  STROBE

  SEE YOU LATER

  COP STORY

  REVOLVER-HERO SQUAD, MINUS ONE

  NO

  Glasgow Central Station, seven months later

  THANKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  COPYRIGHT

  WAS THAT IT THEN, I ASKED

  We drive through the city, black holes open up on every corner, they tug at the sheet metal of the ambulance, Stepanovic is kneeling beside the shitty stretcher I’m lying on, he’s holding me, he’s holding my hand and he’s singing something to me, I like the tune but the words make me want to puke.

  two days earlier, a hotel near the port in Hamburg

  ‘Hello love.’

  ‘Hello, how can I help you?’

  ‘I’m from Unimax. About the sprinkler system.’

  ‘Yes…?’

  ‘Maintenance works.’

  ‘Ah, OK. The keycards for the cellar, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Just a sec … both cards?’

  ‘Two cards would be ideal.’

  ‘No problem … Here you are then.’

  ‘Super, thanks. We’ll just leave them on the counter when we’ve finished, same as ever, yeah?’

  ‘Yes, of course, same as ever.’

  ‘Perfect. Have a nice day, and, ah, you know, you really are looking great today.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, how nice of you.’

  ‘Corporate philosophy.’

  Twinkle, twinkle.

  Smile.

  Back and forth.

  Departure.

  OPEN UP, POLICE

  Stepanovic takes his foot off the gas, he pulls over and switches off the engine. It’s November, it’s dark, it’s cold.

  It’s quiet.

  No wind.

  He gets out, leans against the car and lights a cigarette, the sky gleams orange.

  As of a good half-hour ago, he’s supposed to be on the twentieth floor of this hotel at the harbour edge; he’s supposed to be sitting there, celebrating with his colleague Faller, who turned sixty-five today.

  And that’s damn-well worth celebrating. If you’ve made it that far without being completely screwed.

  Stepanovic drags on his cigarette and watches a woman in the building opposite, on the third floor. Although the woman isn’t wearing conspicuously little, she hasn’t got that much on either, he can see a bare shoulder, a slipped shirt, fair hair pinned up. She’s holding a telephone to her ear with her right hand, with her left hand she’s stirring a pan.

  Stepanovic smokes on, the cigarette helps counter this tightness in his chest that he always feels when he’s supposed to do something that he can’t. Finally getting himself up to that hotel bar, for example.

  But he could ring that woman’s doorbell and say ‘open up, police’ and then he’d stand up there in the doorway and smile at her and create an instant, a situation, something fun, charming, stunning, something at any rate, and she’d let him in, and he wouldn’t need long to get her to fall in love with him, at least for a couple of minutes, or for one night, and then he’d be allowed to eat with her, whatever it is she’s cooking there right now, and he’d be allowed to stay overnight with her, the main thing being not going home, and the main thing being not going to that shitty hotel for this so-called party.

  It’s not about parties themselves, a party can be perfectly fine. But not when the guests include two lovers, or ex-lovers, of a woman he loves with everything he has on hand, even if that’s not particularly impressive, but hey, we can only do our best.

  What on earth are you talking about, he hears her say.

  Yeah, my God, fuck off.

  He throws the cigarette in a puddle, locks the Mercedes, walks over the road and presses the bell belonging to the flat on the third floor, left.

  The pressure on his ribcage eases a little.

  He takes a deep breath, and the night air unscrews his heart, so that the moment that’s about to happen can get in there too.

  WHY EXACTLY DO WE NEED ALL THAT GELIGNITE AGAIN?

  An empty warehouse by the Oberhafen in Hamburg. Inside the warehouse, thirteen men are sitting on crates, one is standing by a table, he’s bending over something that looks like a building plan. The man has the air of a leader, he’s not overly tall, but hulky. You can see he works out, looks like he’s just finished a work-out. He’s wearing a dark bomber jacket, with a black hoodie under it, on his head there’s a grey knitted cap. His skin is leathery, as if he lives by the sea, under the sun, as if he’s in the wrong place here. The other men watch him as he studies the plan, nobody says anything. The youngest is maybe in his mid
-twenties, the eldest around fifty or so, the men come in all colours and all shapes. Some are a little nervous, because a gathering like this, the scent of imminent action, just cries out for nervousness. But because all of them have learnt, over the years, to hide feelings behind faces of cement, what you get is a consciously unruffled conglomeration.

  Some light up cigarettes, the ringleader also pulls a packet from his jacket pocket and smokes, and when he’s finished checking out the site plan, he says: ‘OK, men.’

  The men nod, a couple of them murmur.

  ‘Guns?’ asks the ringleader.

  ‘Got the guns,’ one says, standing up, ‘and the ammo’s ready too. Take your pick – we’ve got Uzis, we’ve got nice, elegant .45s. Plus two pump guns and a sawn-off shotgun. For those of you who like things a little bigger.’

  He sits back down.

  Murmuring.

  ‘Gelignite?’ asks the ringleader.

  ‘Gelignite’s fine,’ says the weapons guy, ‘we’ve got plenty.’

  ‘Why exactly do we need that gelignite, I thought we’d got a tunnel to exit by…’ says another, but stops talking when the leader looks at him.

  ‘Tunnel’s in progress,’ says a small, wiry guy with a beard, who’s chewing the nail on his right index finger.

  The ringleader asks about the keycards.

  Someone, sitting at the edge, on the left, says: ‘Sorted.’

  ‘And how about the clothes?’

  ‘I collected the suits yesterday, from assorted dry-cleaners all around the city,’ says someone in the back row.

  ‘SWAT team uniforms, helmets, gear?’ asks the ringleader.

  ‘Ready to go, man.’

  ‘Crow bars, climbing ropes, rubble chute?’

  The leader’s gaze flies around the room and catches on a man with a baseball cap.

  ‘It’s all there, where it’s meant to be, boss.’

  ‘And everyone could recite the plan from memory in their sleep?’

  Collective nod.

  ‘Good. Then we’ll run through this thing again.’

  MY HEART MAKES AN UNHEALTHY SOUND

  The walls are made of glass, dangling from the black ceiling are a couple of dimmed spherical lamps, lying at our feet is the port of Hamburg in its gleaming night-time light. This bar makes such a big deal about the view that I shouldn’t really trust any drink I didn’t mix myself as far as I could throw it. Too much obtrusive beauty, too many look-at-me things, too much distraction. Surely no one can concentrate on their alcohol here.

  My people are sitting towards the back, at a large table.

  In front of it are loads of stand-up bar tables and barstools, a maze of stilts; beside it, a long, elegant bar. A dimly lit perspective with a spectacular view of this city at each end.

  It’s a puzzle to me why Faller has to celebrate his birthday here of all places, after all, we’re more out of place in a joint like this than a pack of mongrels in a plastic bag. Why aren’t we standing at a sticky bar in the Silbersack and drinking bottled beer, why aren’t we sitting in a dark pizzeria being noisy, and where’s the freaking jukebox in this place, oh, there isn’t one, got you, all you get here are two men, and just the sight of these self-same guys instantly crushes something inside me, just glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye is usually enough.

  Now I take a head-on look at each of them for a second, first Klatsche, then Inceman.

  My heart makes an unhealthy sound.

  ‘Hello,’ I say to everyone, partly to distract from that sound.

  And everyone’s like: ‘Hello?’

  Yes, I know, I’m a bit late.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, guys.’

  ‘Not to worry, my girl,’ says Faller, reaching for my hands and smiling at me.

  He looks good.

  He’s wearing a black roll-neck; he checked his hat and coat in at the cloakroom, just like everyone else checked their things in at the cloakroom. Faller lets go of my hands and I shove them in the pockets of my dark-blue bomber jacket. I’ll never check a jacket or coat in at a cloakroom. That’s like checking a suit of armour in at the cloakroom, you just can’t do that, it leaves you entirely defenceless.

  ‘Pick yourself a nice spot,’ says Faller.

  Now he says that.

  There’s only one chair free. Between Brückner and Calabretta, so that makes it a very nice spot, except that it’s also diagonally opposite Klatsche, which makes it a very complicated spot.

  I sit down all the same, trying not to look in any particular direction, and ask: ‘Where’s Stepanovic then, don’t they allow cowboys in here or what?’

  ‘Half of us wouldn’t be here in that case,’ says Faller.

  And Carla says: ‘We thought you might know.’ There’s that undertone. ‘We thought you might arrive together.’

  I know what she means and I try to give an unobtrusive smile to let her know that I know and, yes, I would actually have expected to turn up here with him, just because we’re pretty good at turning up to places together, but there have been certain moments in the last few months when things have got somewhat difficult between us.

  I told him in high spirits – OK, more in export-strength spirits – that I still repeatedly go to bed with Inceman, and he considered that to be more than a little bit shit.

  I kind of got the impression that it really niggled at him.

  But I can’t help him there. I’m just the rather confusing kind of woman.

  I shake my head and say: ‘Haven’t heard from him for days. But he said last week that he was coming.’

  ‘Then he’ll be here,’ says Faller, determined not to let anything or anyone spoil the mood, least of all his friends.

  He’s probably the only person in the room who knows, with every fibre of his heart, just how confusing I am, and not just me, but us all, every person in the whole damn world even. Faller knows about the huge knot we form, which I can sometimes only vaguely perceive when I stumble past someone and in doing so catch hold of a hand and feel the little cracks, the damage to the surface and think: wow, you too?

  Stepanovic’s hands are full of them and while I’m thinking about his hands like that, I notice that there isn’t a chair for him if he really does come along later, and Rocco must have noticed too because he says: ‘Guys, we’re a chair short.’

  Faller smiles around at us all.

  ‘I didn’t actually expect all of you to turn up.’

  ‘I was totally expecting it,’ says Klatsche, and looks at me with that certain uh-huh look, and perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Inceman is looking at me with a similar I-can-see-into-your-every-last-corner look.

  Well.

  We’ve got a situation here.

  I’ve got a situation with my ex-lover and my on-and-off lover, but then all the rest of us have heaps of situations with each other too. Calabretta, Carla and Rocco, for example, yes, everyone here has a past with everyone, and the resulting situation can be found in full and in detail at this table. Perhaps it’s just as well that Stepanovic isn’t here, perhaps it would even be a relief if he didn’t come at all now, because our situation already feels positively designed to overflow. As if just one more person coming along and sitting in the bathtub with us and then plunging their hand in there, into all the interconnections between us, would mean water everywhere.

  I’d probably be the first to cry.

  Why, I can’t say, I just feel a bit wobbly. That’s another reason why I’m definitely not the one who’d care if Stepanovic joined us, and the lot of you can take a running jump.

  Instead, I try to sort things out a little. The situation and myself.

  Sitting at one end of the table is Faller, who wants to celebrate his birthday.

  To his left are Inceman, Schulle, Brückner, then me.

  Sitting opposite Faller is Calabretta.

  Round the corner next to him are Anne Stanislawski, Klatsche, Rocco.

  Then Carla, who’s just laid a hand on Faller’s
left forearm and asked him if he’s OK.

  He nods.

  Question and nod make me realise, in a heartbeat, that we’re not here for our own sakes, that we don’t matter a damn just now. Hey, friendship means stepping out of our own egocentric circles too.

  We’re here for Faller’s sake, and all the lawn and flowerbeds and so on between us that have been trampled over in recent years are utterly irrelevant, and Carla’s question is the only one that matters: How’s the old man doing?

  If I’m interpreting the expression on his face correctly, he’s quite content. After everything he’s been through in his life. There are two dead women anyway, two dead prostitutes, so women whose lives already weren’t playing out on the sunny side, and then along came Faller. He loved the first of them, Minou, and because he did and because he thought it was that simple, because he thought he was allowed to love whoever he liked and was allowed to save whoever he liked, she had to die. He didn’t even know the second. There had been absolutely no need for an introduction to her before getting mixed up in her death. Having tangled with the Albanian mafia was enough. And so the kid was dead. Lying in bed next to a knocked-out Faller, her underwear soaked in blood. Sometimes I still find myself asking how a man’s soul actually survives a thing like that. Well. The injuries are still clearly visible, at least for people who know a bit about injuries. Then there was the bullet right through his shoulder, which must definitely have left a few splinters in his memory, and which was my fault. After all that, a few years ago, he started fighting again, for justice, for his soul, to avenge his dead. And now he’s sitting here surrounded by people who like him. Sometimes, that liking even borders on love, but of course I can only speak for myself, and maybe for Calabretta too. The light in the bar lays a dark-gold filter over Faller’s face, softens the deep creases around his mouth, around his nose, around his eyes. He looks at us one after another.

  The waiter comes and asks me what I’d like to drink. There are all kinds of drinks on the table, everyone’s ordered something different, whoa, yet another keg of confusion, just stop that for a second please.